Soren Kierkegaard, Either-Or 1843 Wiki

Either/Or

For other uses, see Either/Or (disambiguation).

Either/Or (Danish: Enten - Eller) is the first published
work of the Danish philosopher S0ren Kierkegaard. Ap-
pearing in two volumes in 1 843 under the pseudonymous
authorship of Victor Eremita (Latin for "victorious her-
mit") it outlines a theory of human development in which
consciousness progresses from an essentially hedonistic,
aesthetic mode to one characterized by ethical impera-
tives arising from the maturing of human conscience.

Either/Or portrays two life views, one consciously
hedonistic, the other based on ethical duty and respon-
sibility. Each life view is written and represented by
a fictional pseudonymous author, with the prose of the
work reflecting and depending on the life view being dis-
cussed. For example, the aesthetic life view is written in
short essay form, with poetic imagery and allusions, dis-
cussing aesthetic topics such as music, seduction, drama,
and beauty. The ethical life view is written as two long
letters, with a more argumentative and restrained prose,
discussing moral responsibility, critical reflection, and
marriage. 111 The views of the book are not neatly summa-
rized, but are expressed as lived experiences embodied by
the pseudonymous authors. The book's central concern is
the primal question asked by Aristotle, "How should we
live?" 121 His book was certainly informed by Epictetus;
"Consider first, man, what the matter is, and what your
own nature is able to bear. If you would be a wrestler,
consider your shoulders, your back, your thighs; for dif-
ferent persons are made for different things. Do you think
that you can act as you do and be a philosopher, that you
can eat, drink, be angry, be discontented, as you are now?
You must watch, you must labor, you must get the better
of certain appetites, must quit your acquaintances, be de-
spised by your servant, be laughed at by those you meet;
come off worse than others in everything — in offices, in
honors, before tribunals. When you have fully considered
all these things, approach, if you please — that is, if, by
parting with them, you have a mind to purchase serenity,
freedom, and tranquillity. If not, do not come hither; do
not, like children, be now a philosopher, then a publican,
then an orator, and then one of Caesar's officers. These
things are not consistent. You must be one man, either
good or bad. You must cultivate either your own reason
or else externals; apply yourself either to things within or
without you — that is, be either a philosopher or one of the
mob."' 31 His motto comes from Plutarch, "The deceived
is wiser than one not deceived."' 41

The aesthetic is the personal, subjective realm of ex-

istence, where an individual lives and extracts pleasure
from life only for his or her own sake. In this realm, one
has the possibility of the highest as well as the lowest. The
ethical, on the other hand, is the civic realm of existence,
where one's value and identity are judged and at times
superseded by the objective world. In simple terms, one
can choose either to remain oblivious to all that goes on
in the world, or to become involved. More specifically,
the ethic realm starts with a conscious effort to choose
one's life, with a choice to choose. Either way, however,
an individual can go too far in these realms and lose sight
of his or her true self. Only faith can rescue the indi-
vidual from these two opposing realms. Either/Or con-
cludes with a brief sermon hinting at the nature of the
religious sphere of existence, which Kierkegaard spent
most of his publishing career expounding upon. Ulti-
mately, Kierkegaard's challenge is for the reader to "dis-
cover a second face hidden behind the one you see"' 51 in
him/herself first, and then in others:

The Middle Ages are altogether impreg-
nated with the idea of representation, partly
conscious, partly unconscious; the total is rep-
resented by the single individual, yet in such a
way that it is only a single aspect which is de-
termined as totality, and which now appears in
a single individual, who is because of this, both
more and less than an individual. By the side
of this individual there stands another individ-
ual, who, likewise, totally represents another
aspect of life's content, such as the knight and
the scholastic, the ecclesiastic and the layman.
Either/Or Part I p. 86-87 Swenson

1 Historical context

After writing and defending his dissertation On the Con-
cept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841),
Kierkegaard left Copenhagen in October 1841 to spend
the winter in Berlin. The main purpose of this visit
was to attend the lectures by the German philosopher
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, who was an em-
inent figure at the time. The lectures turned out to
be a disappointment for many in Schelling's audience,
including Mikhail Bakunin and Friedrich Engels, and
Kierkegaard described it as "unbearable nonsense". 161
During his stay, Kierkegaard worked on the manuscript
for Either/Or, took daily lessons to perfect his German
and attended operas and plays, particularly by Wolfgang

1

2

2 STRUCTURE

Amadeus Mozart and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He
returned to Copenhagen in March 1842 with a draft of the
manuscript, which was completed near the end of 1842
and published in February 1843.

According to a journal entry from 1846, Either/Or "was
written lock, stock, and barrel in eleven months", 171181 al-
though a page from the "Diapsalmata" section in the 'A'
volume was written before that time.

The title Either /Or is an affirmation of Aristotelian logic,
particularly as modified by Johann Gottlieb Fichte 191 and
Immanuel Kant. Is the question, "Who am I?" a scientific
question or one for the single individual to answer for him
or her self?

Fichte wrote in The Science of Knowledge "The ques-
tion has been asked, What was I before I became self-
conscious? The answer is, I was not at all, for I was not
I. The Ego is only in so far as it is conscious of itself.
.... The proposition not A is not A will doubtless be
recognized by every one as certain, and it is scarcely to
be expected that any one will ask for its proof. If, how-
ever, such a proof were possible, it must in our system be
deduced from the proposition A=A. But such a proof is
impossible." 1101

• Law of identity (A = A; a thing is identical to itself)

• Law of excluded middle (either A or not-A; a thing
is either something or not that thing, no third option)

• Law of noncontradiction, (not both A and not-A; a
thing cannot be both true and not true in the same
instant)

Hegel giving a speech

In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's work, The Science
of Logic (1812), Hegel had criticized Aristotle's laws of
classical logic for being static, rather than dynamic and
becoming, and had replaced it with his own dialecti-
cal logic. Hegel formulated addendums for Aristotle's

l aws; [H][12][13][14][15]

• Law of identity is inaccurate because a thing is al-
ways more than itself

• Law of excluded middle is inaccurate because a
thing can be both itself and many others

• Law of non-contradiction is inaccurate because ev-
erything in existence is both itself and not itself

Kierkegaard spoke of Hegel's Logic metaphorically in
1844:

Thus when an author entitles the last sec-
tion of the Logic "Actuality," he thereby gains
the advantage of making it appear that in logic
the highest has already been achieved, or if
one prefers, the lowest. In the meantime, the
loss is obvious, for neither logic nor actuality
is served by placing actuality in the Logic. Ac-
tuality is not served thereby, for contingency,
which is an essential part of the actual, cannot
be admitted within the realm of logic. ... If
anyone would take the trouble to collect and
put together all the strange pixies and gob-
lins who like busy clerks bring about move-
ment in Hegelian logic a later age would per-
haps be surprised to see that what are regarded
as discarded witticisms once played an impor-
tant role in logic, not as incidental explana-
tions and ingenious remarks but as masters of
movement, which made Hegel's logic some-
thing of a miracle and gave logical thought
feet to move on, without anyone's being able
to observe them. Concept of Anxiety, S0ren
Kierkegaard, Nichol translation, p. 9-10, note
12

Kierkegaard argues that Hegel's philosophy dehumanized
life by denying personal freedom and choice through the
neutralization of the 'either/or'. The dialectic structure of
becoming renders existence far too easy, in Hegel's the-
ory, because conflicts are eventually mediated and disap-
pear automatically through a natural process that requires
no individual choice other than a submission to the will
of the Idea or Geist. Kierkegaard saw this as a denial of
true selfhood and instead advocated the importance of
personal responsibility and choice-making. 114111511161

2 Structure

The book is the first of Kierkegaard's works written
pseudonymously, a practice he employed during the first
half of his career. 11711181 In this case, four pseudonyms are
used:

• 'Victor Eremita" - the fictional compiler and editor
of the texts, which he claims to have found in an
antique escritoire.

3.2 The Immediate Stages of the Erotic, or Musical Erotic

3

• "A" - the moniker given to the fictional author of the
first text ("Either") by Victor Eremita, whose real
name he claims not to have known.

• "Judge Vilhelm" - the fictional author of the second
text ("Or").

• "Johannes" - the fictional author of a section of 'Ei-
ther' titled "The Diary of a Seducer" and Cordelia
his lover

3 Either

The first volume, the "Either", describes the "aesthetic"
phase of existence. It contains a collection of pa-
pers, found by 'Victor Eremita' and written by 'A', the
"aesthete." [6] [15]

The aesthete, according to Kierkegaard's model, will
eventually find himself in "despair", a psychological state
(explored further in Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anx-
iety and The Sickness Unto Death) that results from a
recognition of the limits of the aesthetic approach to life.
Kierkegaard's "despair" is a somewhat analogous precur-
sor of existential angst. The natural reaction is to make an
eventual "leap" to the second phase, the "ethical," which
is characterized as a phase in which rational choice and
commitment replace the capricious and inconsistent long-
ings of the aesthetic mode. Ultimately, for Kierkegaard,
the aesthetic and the ethical are both superseded by a fi-
nal phase which he terms the "religious" mode. This is
introduced later in Fear and Trembling.

3.1 Diapsalmata

The first section of Either is a collection of many tan-
gential aphorisms, epigrams, anecdotes and musings on
the aesthetic mode of life. The word 'diapsalmata' is re-
lated to 'psalms', and means "refrains". It contains some
of Kierkegaard's most famous and poetic lines, such as
"What is a poet?", "Freedom of Speech" vs. "Freedom of
Thought", the "Unmovable chess piece", the tragic clown,
and the laughter of the gods. [19]

If one were to read these as written they would show a
constant movement from the outer poetic experience to
the inner experience of humor. The movement from the
outer to the inner is a theme in Kierkegaard's works.

3.2 The Immediate Stages of the Erotic, or
Musical Erotic

An essay discussing the idea that music expresses the
spirit of sensuality. A' evaluates Mozart's The Marriage
of Figaro, The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni, as well
as Goethe's Faust. A' has taken upon himself the task
of proving, through the works of Mozart, that "music is

Don Juan and the Commande/ 20 ^

a higher, or more spiritual art, than language". During
this process he develops the three stages of the musical-
erotic. [21]

Here he makes the distinction between a seducer like Don
Juan, who falls under aesthetic categories, and Faust, who
falls under ethical categories. "The musical Don Juan en-
joys the satisfaction of desire; the reflective Don Juan en-
joys the deception, enjoys the cunning." Don Juan is split
between the esthetic and the ethical. He's lost in the mul-
tiplicity of the "1,003 women he has to seduce". [22 ' Faust
seduces just one woman. Kierkegaard is writing deep the-
ology here. He's asking if God seduces 1,003 people at
one time or if he seduces one single individual at a time
in order to make a believer. He also wrote about seducers
in this way:

Achim v. Arnim tells
somewhere of a seducer of a very
different style, a seducer who falls
under ethical categories. About
him he uses an expression which
in truth, boldness, and conciseness
is almost equal to Mozart's stroke
of the bow. He says he could so
talk with a woman that, if the devil
caught him, he could wheedle him-
self out of it if he had a chance to
talk with the devil's grandmother.
This is the real seducer; the aes-
thetic interest here is also different,
namely: how, the method. There
is evidently something very pro-

4

3 EITHER

found here, which has perhaps es-
caped the attention of most peo-
ple, in that Faust, who reproduces
Don Juan, seduces only one girl,
while Don Juan seduced hundreds;
but this one girl is also, in an in-
tensive sense, seduced and crushed
quite differently from all those Don
Juan has deceived, simply because
Faust, as reproduction, falls under
the category of the intellectual. The
power of such a seducer is speech,
i.e., the lie.

A few days ago I heard one sol-
dier talking to another about a third
who had betrayed a girl; he did not
give a long-winded description, and
yet his expression was very pithy:
"He gets away with things like that
by lies and things like that." Such
a seducer is of quite a different sort
from Don Juan, is essentially differ-
ent from him, as one can see from
the fact that he and his activities are
extremely unmusical, and from the
aesthetic standpoint come within
the category of the interesting. The
object of his desire is accordingly,
when one rightly considers him aes-
thetically, something more than the
mere sensuous. But what is this
force, then by which Don Juan se-
duces? It is desire, the energy of
sensuous desire. He desires in ev-
ery woman, the whole of woman-
hood, and therein lies the sensu-
ously idealizing power with which
he at once embellishes and over-
comes his prey. The reaction beau-
tifies and develops the one desired,
who flushes in enhanced beauty by
its reflection. As the enthusiast's
fire with seductive splendor illu-
mines even those who stand in a ca-
sual relation to him, so Don Juan
transfigures in a far deeper sense ev-
ery girl, since his relation to her is
an essential one. Therefore all finite
differences fade away before him
in comparison with the main thing:
being a woman. He rejuvenates
the older woman into the beautiful
middle age of womanhood; he ma-
tures the child almost instantly; ev-
erything which is woman is his prey
(pur che v porti la gonella, voi sapete
quel che" fa).

Either/Or Part 1, S0ren

Kierkegaard, 1843, Swenson, 1970
[1944], p. 98-99

Kierkegaard believed the spiritual element was missing
in Don Juan's and in Faust's view of life. He wrote the
following in 1845.

Assume that a woman as beautiful as the
concubine of a god and as clever as the Queen
of Sheba were willing to squander the summa
summarum [sum of sums] of her hidden and
manifest charms on my unworthy cleverness;
assume that on the same evening one of my
peers invited me to drink wine with him and
clink glasses and smoke tobacco in student
fashion and enjoy the old classics together-I
would not ponder very long. What prudery,
they shout. Prudery? I do not think that it is so.
In my opinion, all this beauty and cleverness,
together with love and the eternal, have infi-
nite worth, but without that a relation between
man and woman, which nevertheless essen-
tially wants to express this, is not worth a pipe
of tobacco. In my opinion, when falling in love
is separated from this-please note, the eter-
nal from falling in love-one can properly speak
only of what is left over, which would be the
same as talking like a midwife, who does not
beat about the bush, or like a dead and departed
one who, "seared to spirit," does not feel stimu-
lus. It is comic that the action in the vaudeville
revolves around four marks and eight shillings,
and it is the same here also. When falling in
love-that is, the eternal in falling in love-is ab-
sent, then the erotic, despite all possible clever-
ness, revolves around what becomes nauseating
because spirit qua spirit wants to have an am-
biguous involvement with it. It is comic that a
mentally disordered man picks up any piece of
granite and carries it around because he thinks
it is money, and in the same way it is comic that
Don Juan has 1,003 mistresses, for the num-
ber simply indicates that they have no value.
Therefore, one should stay within one's means
in the use of the word "love." When there is
need, one should not shy away from using de-
scriptive terms that both the Bible and Holberg
use, but neither should one be so superclever
that one believes that cleverness is the consti-
tuting factor, for it constitutes anything but an
erotic relationship. S0ren Kierkegaard, Stages
on Life's Way, Hong, p. 292-293

3.3 Essays read before the Sympara-
nekromenoi

The next three sections are essay lectures from A' to the
'Symparanekromenoi', a club or fellowship of the dead

3.3 Essays read before the Symparanekromenoi

5

Antigone and Polynices

who practice the art of writing posthumous papers.

The first essay, which discusses ancient and modern
tragedy, is called the "Ancient Tragical Motif as Re-
flected in the Modern". Once again he is writing about the
inner and the outer aspects of tragedy. Can remorse be
shown on a stage? What about sorrow and pain? Which
is easier to portray? 1231 He also discusses guilt, sin, fear,
compassion, and responsibility in what can be considered
a foreshadowing of Fear and Trembling and Repetition} 24 ^
He then writes a modern interpretation of Antigone which
leads into The Concept of Anxiety.

Draw nearer to me, dear brothers of Sym-
paranekromenoi; close around me as I send my
tragic heroine out into the world, as I give the
daughter of sorrow a dowry of pain as a wed-
ding gift. She is my creation, but still her out-
line is so vague, her form so nebulous, that each
one of you is free to imagine her as you will,
and each one of you can love her in your own
way. She is my creation, her thoughts are my
thoughts, and yet it is as if I had rested with
her in a night of love, as if she had entrusted
me with her deep secret, breathed it and her
soul out in my embrace, and as if in the same
moment she changed before me, vanished, so
that her actuality could only be traced in the
mood that remained, instead of the converse
being true, that my mood brought her forth to
a greater and greater actuality. I placed the
words in her mouth, and yet it is as if I abused
her confidence; to me, it is as if she stood re-
proachfully behind me, and yet it is the other
way around, in her mystery she becomes ever
more and more visible. She is my possession,
my lawful possession, and yet sometimes it is as
if I had slyly insinuated myself into her confi-
dence, as if I must constantly look behind me to
find her, and yet, on the contrary, she lies con-
stantly before me, she constantly comes into
existence only as I bring her forth. She is called
Antigone. This name I retain from the ancient

tragedy, which for the most part I will follow,
although, from another point of view, every-
thing will be modern. Either/Or Part I, Swen-
son, p. 151

That which in the Greek sense affords the
tragic interest is that Oedipus' sorrowful des-
tiny re-echoes in the brother's unhappy death,
in the sister's collision with a simple human
prohibition; it is, so to say, the after effects,
the tragic destiny of Oedipus, ramifying in ev-
ery branch of his family. This is the totality
which makes the sorrow of the spectator so in-
finitely deep. It is not an individual who goes
down, it is a small world, it is the objective
sorrow, which, released, now advances in its
own terrible consistency, like a force of na-
ture, and Antigone's unhappy fate, an echo of
her fathers, is an intensified sorrow. When,
therefore, Antigone in defiance of the king's
prohibition resolves to bury her brother, we do
not see in this so much a free action on her part
as a fateful necessity, which visits the sins of
the fathers upon the children. There is indeed
enough freedom of action in this to make us
love Antigone for her sisterly affection, but in
the necessity of fate there is also, as it were, a
higher refrain which envelops not only the life
of Oedipus but also his entire family. Either/Or
Part I, Swenson, p. 154

The second essay, called "Shadowgraphs: A
Psychological Pastime", discusses modern heroines,
including Mozart's Elvira and Goethe's Gretchen (Mar-
garet). He studies how desire can come to grief in the
single individual.

It is this reflective grief which I now pro-
pose to bring before you and, as far as possi-
ble, render visible by means of some pictures.
I call these sketches Shadowgraphs, partly by
the designation to remind you at once that they
derive from the darker side of life, partly be-
cause like other shadowgraphs they are not di-
rectly visible. When I take a shadowgraph in
my hand, it makes no impression upon me, and
gives me no clear conception of it. Only when
I hold it up opposite the wall, and now look not
directly at it, but at that which appears on the
wall, am I able to see it. So also with the picture
which I wish to show here, an inward picture
which does not become perceptible until I see
it through the external. This external is perhaps
quite unobtrusive but not until I look through
it, do I discover that inner picture which I de-
sire to show you, an inner picture too delicately
drawn to be outwardly visible, woven as it is of
the tenderest moods of the soul. If I look at

6

3 EITHER

a sheet of paper, there may seem to be noth-
ing remarkable about it, but when I hold it up
to the light and look through it, then I discover
the delicate inner inscriptions, too ethereal, as
it were, to be perceived directly. Turn your at-
tention then, dear Symparanekromenoi, to this
inner picture; do not allow yourselves to be dis-
tracted by the external appearance, or rather,
do not yourselves summon the external before
you, for it shall be my task constantly to draw
it aside, in order to afford you a better view of
the inner picture. Either/Or Part I, Swenson, p.
171

Historically he's asking if one person can bring the inner
life of a historical figure into view. Psychologically he's
asking if psychologists can really give an accurate picture
of the inner world. Religiously he's asking if one person
can accurately perceive the inner world of the spirituality
of another person. He conducts several thought experi-
ments to see if he can do it.

The third essay, called "The Unhappiest One", discusses
the hypothetical question: "who deserves the distinction
of being unhappier than everyone else?" Kierkegaard has
progressed from a search for the highest' 251 to the search
for the lowest.' 261 Now he wants to find the unhappy per-
son by looking once again to the past. Is it Niobe, or Job,
or the father of the prodigal son, or is it Periander, 1271
Abraham, or Christ? This is, of course, about the new
science of anthropology, which digs up everyone and tells
the world if the people were happy or sad.

3.4 The First Love

In this volume Kierkegaard examines the concept of
'First Love' as a pinnacle for the aestheticist, using his
idiosyncratic concepts of 'closedness' (indesluttethed in
Danish) and the 'demonic' (demoniske) with reference to
Eugene Scribe. Scribe wanted to create a template for
all playwrights to follow. He insisted that people go to
plays to escape from reality and not for instruction.' 281
Kierkegaard is against any template in the field of lit-
erature or of Christianity. He was against systematiz-
ing anything in literature because the system brings the
artist to a stop and he or she just settles down in the sys-
tem. Kierkegaard has been writing against reading about
love instead of discovering love. Scribe's play is 16 pages
long 1291 and Kierkegaard writes a 50 page review of the
book. He wrote against the practice of reading reviews
instead of the actual books themselves.

In his review he goes to the play himself and sees his lover
at a play called First Love; for him this is a sign, like a
four leaf clover, that she must be the one. But confu-
sion sets in for the poor girl because of mistaken iden-
tity. She is unable to make up her mind about love and
says, "The first love is the true love, and one loves only
once." But Kierkegaard says this is sophistry "because

the category first, is at the same time a qualitative and
a numerical category." Her first impression of love, when
she was eight, has become decisive for her whole life. 1301
Now she can love only to a certain degree because she's
comparing each new experience with the past experience.
Kierkegaard discussed this again in 1845.

take a little pity on me. I myself feel what
a sorry figure I cut these days when even the
girls die as passionately of love as Falstaff pas-
sionately falls in the battle with Percy-and then
rise up again, vigorous and nubile enough to
drink to a fresh love. Bravo! And by this kind
of talk, or rather, by a life that justifies talk-
ing this way, I would think-provided that one
person can benefit another at all-I would think
that I have benefited my esteemed contempo-
raries more than by writing a paragraph in the
system. What it depends on is the positing of
life's pathological elements absolutely, clearly,
legibly, and powerfully, so that life does not
come to be like the system, a secondhand store
where there is a little of everything, so that one
does everything to a certain degree, so that one
does not tell a lie but is ashamed of oneself,
does not tell a lie and then, eroticalfy speak-
ing, romantically dies of love and is a hero,
but does not stop at that or just lie there but
gets up again and goes further and become a
hero of novels of everyday life, and goes fur-
ther yet and becomes frivolous, witty, a hero
in Scribe. Imagine eternity in a confusion like
that; imagine a man like that on Judgment Day;
imagine hearing the voice of God, "Have you
believed?" Imagine hearing the answer, "Faith
is the immediate; one should not stop with the
immediate as they did in the Middle Ages, but
since Hegel one goes further; nevertheless one
admits that it is the immediate and that the im-
mediate exists but anticipates a new treatise."
S0ren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life's Way, 1845,
Hong, p. 291-292

3.5 Crop Rotation: An Attempt at a The-
ory of Social Prudence

In agriculture, one rotates the crop to keep the soil fertile
and full of nutrients. Crop Rotation in Either /Or refers
to the aesthete's need to keep life "interesting", to avoid
both boredom and the need to face the responsibilities of
an ethical life.

3.6 Diary of a Seducer

Written by 'Johannes the Seducer', this volume illustrates
how the aesthete holds the "interesting" as his highest

7

value and how, to satisfy his voyeuristic reflections, he
manipulates his situation from the boring to the inter-
esting. He will use irony, artifice, caprice, imagination
and arbitrariness to engineer poetically satisfying possi-
bilities; he is not so much interested in the act of seduc-
tion as in willfully creating its interesting possibility.

Kierkegaard has this seducer speak again in Stages on
Life's Way 1311 where he explores some of the possibilities
and then once more where he tries to explain that mis-
understanding can be the root of the unity of the tragic
and the comic. "Anyone who, when he is twenty years
old, does not understand that there is a categorical im-
perative — Enjoy — is a fool, and anyone who does not

start doing it is a Christiansfelder Our young friend

will always remain on the outside. Victor' 321 is a fanatic;
Constantin has paid too much for his intellect; the Fash-
ion Designer is a madman. All four of you after the same
girl will turn out to be a fizzle! Have enough fanaticism to
idealize, enough appetite to join in the jolly conviviality
of desire, enough understanding to break off in exactly
the same way death breaks off, enough rage to want to
enjoy it all over again — then one is the favorite of the
gods and of the girls."' 331

Kierkegaard has the category of choice and the esthetic
as well as the ethical. Both can choose to love each other
but the "how" of love is what Kierkegaard is getting at.

The tragic is that the two lovers don't un-
derstand each other; the comic is that two who
do not understand each other love each other.
That such a thing can happen is not inconceiv-
able, for erotic love itself has its dialectic, and
even if it were unprecedented, the construc-
tion, of course, has the absolute power to con-
struct imaginatively. When the heterogeneous
is sustained the way I have sustained it, then
both parties are right in saying that they love.
Love itself has an ethical and an esthetic el-
ement. She declares that she loves and has
the esthetic element and understands it esthet-
ically; he says that he loves and understands it
ethically. Hence they both love and love each
other, but nevertheless it is a misunderstand-
ing. Stages on Life's Way, Hong (Letter to the
Reader) p. 421

4 Or

The second volume represents the ethical stage. Victor
Eremita found a group of letters from a retired Judge Vil-
helm or William, another pseudonymous author, to A',
trying to convince A' of the value of the ethical stage of
life by arguing that the ethical person can still enjoy aes-
thetic values. The difference is that the pursuit of plea-
sure is tempered with ethical values and responsibilities.

• "The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage": The first let-
ter is about the aesthetic value of marriage and de-
fends marriage as a way of life.

• "Equilibrium between the Aesthetic and the Ethi-
cal in the Development of Personality": The second
letter concerns the more explicit ethical subject of
choosing the good, or one's self, and of the value of
making binding life-choices.

• "Ultimatium": The volume ends in a discourse on
the Upbuilding in the Thought that: against God we
are always in the wrong. 1341 His spiritual advice for
"A" and "B" is that they make peace with each other.
Here Kierkegaard quotes from the Gospel of Luke
Chapter 19 verses 42 to the end for this discourse.

And when he drew near and saw the
city, he wept over it, saying: Would
that even today you knew the things that
make for peace! But now they are hid
from your eyes. For the days shall come
upon you when your enemies will cast
up a bank about you and surround you
and hem you in on every side, and then
will dash you to the ground and your chil-
dren within you will not leave one stone
upon another in you, because you did not
know the time of your visitation. And
he entered the temple and began to drive
out those who sold, saying not them: It is
written, "My house is a house of prayer,"
but you have made it a den of robbers.
And he taught daily in the temple. But
the chief priests and the scribes and the
principal men of the people sought to de-
stroy him, but they did not find what they
should do, for all the people clung to him
and listened to him. Either/Or Part 2,
Hong, p. 341 (Luke 19:41-48)

It's human nature to look to external forces when faced
with our own inadequacies but the ethicist is against this.
Comparison is an esthetic exercise and has nothing to do
with ethics and religion. He says, "Let each one learn
what he can; both of us can learn that a person's un-
happiness never lies in his lack of control over external
conditions, since this would only make him completely
unhappy."' 351 He also asks if a person "absolutely in love
can know if he is more or less in love than others."' 361 He
completes this thought later in his Concluding Unscien-
tific Postscript and expands on looking inward in Practice
in Christianity.

The ethical and the ethical-religious have
nothing to do with the comparative. ... All
comparison delays, and that is why mediocrity
likes it so much and, if possible, traps everyone

8

4

in it by its despicable friendship among medio-
crities. A person who blames others, that they
have corrupted him, is talking nonsense and
only informs against himself. Concluding Un-
scientific Postscript p. 549-550

Comparison is the most disastrous associa-
tion that love can enter into; comparison is the
most dangerous acquaintance love can make;
comparison is the worst of all seductions.
S0ren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (1847),
Hong, p. 186

captivated and entangled and could never es-
cape either in time or in eternity; it is as if you
lost yourself, as if you ceased to be; it is as if
you would repent of it the next moment and
yet it cannot be undone. It is an earnest and
significant moment when a person links him-
self to an eternal power for an eternity, when
he accepts himself as the one whose remem-
brance time will never erase, when in an eter-
nal and unerring sense he becomes conscious
of himself as the person he is. Judge Vilhelm,
Either /Or II p. 206 Hong 1987

Lord Jesus Christ, our foolish minds are
weak; they are more than willing to be drawn-
and there is so much that wants to draw us
to itself. There is pleasure with its seduc-
tive power, the multiplicity with its bewilder-
ing distractions, the moment with its infatu-
ating importance and the conceited laborious-
ness of busyness and the careless time-wasting
of light-mindedness and the gloomy brooding
of heavy-mindedness-all this will draw us away
from ourselves to itself in order to deceive us.
But you, who are the truth, only you, Savior
and Redeemer, can truly draw a person to your-
self, which you have promised to do-that you
will draw all to yourself. Then may God grant
that by repenting we may come to ourselves, so
that you, according to your Word, can draw us
to yourself -from on high, but through lowliness
and abasement. S0ren Kierkegaard, Practice in
Christianity, 1850 p. 157 Hong

Introducing the ethical stage it is moreover unclear
if Kierkegaard acknowledges an ethical stage without
religion. Freedom seems to denote freedom to choose the
will to do the right and to denounce the wrong in a secular,
almost Kantian style. However, remorse (angeren) seems
to be a religious category specifically related to the Chris-
tian concept of deliverance. [37] Moreover, Kierkegaard is
constant in his point of view that each single individual
can become conscious of a higher self than the externally
visible human self and embrace the spiritual self in "an
eternal understanding".

In a spiritual sense that by which a person
gives birth is the formative striving of the will
and that is within a person's own power. What
are you afraid of then? After all, you are not
supposed to give birth to another human being;
you are supposed to give birth only to your-
self. And yet I am fully aware that there is
an earnestness about this that shakes the entire
soul; to become conscious in one's eternal va-
lidity is a moment that is more significant than
everything else in the world. It is as if you were

The self that is the objective is not only
a personal self but a social, a civic self. He
then possesses himself as a task in an activ-
ity whereby he engages in the affairs of life as
this specific personality. Here his task is not to
form himself but to act, and yet he forms him-
self at the same time, because, as I noted above,
the ethical individual lives in such a way that
he is continually transferring himself from one
stage to another. S0ren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
II p. 262-263

A Providence watches over each man's
wandering through life. It provides him with
two guides. The one calls him forward. The
other calls him back. They are, however, not
in opposition to each other, these two guides,
nor do they leave the wanderer standing there
in doubt, confused by the double call. Rather
the two are in eternal understanding with each
other. For the one beckons forward to the

Good, the other calls man back from evil

The two guides call out to a man early and
late, and when he listens to their call, then he
finds his way, then he can know where he is,
on the way. Because these two calls designate
the place and show the way. Of these two, the
call of remorse is perhaps the best. For the ea-
ger traveler who travels lightly along the way
does not, in this fashion, learn to know it as
well as a wayfarer with a heavy burden. The
one who merely strives to get on does not learn
to know the way as well as the remorseful man.
The eager traveler hurries forward to the new,
to the novel, and, indeed, away from experi-
ence. But the remorseful one, who comes be-
hind, laboriously gathers up experience. S0ren
Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One
Thing, from Upbuilding Discourses in Various
Spirits (1846), Steere translation 1938 p. 39-40

9

5 Discourses and sequel

Along with this work, Kierkegaard published, under
his own name, Two Upbuilding Discourses^ on May
16, 1843 intended to complement Either/Or, "The Ex-
pectancy of Faith" and "Every Good and Every Perfect
Gift is from Above". [39] Kierkegaard also published an-
other discourse during the printing of the second edition
of Either/Or in 1849. [40]

Kierkegaard's discourse has to do with the difference be-
tween wishing and willing in the development of a partic-
ular expectancy. "As thought becomes more absorbed in
the future, it loses its way in its restless attempt to force
or entice an explanation from the riddle." Expectancy al-
ways looks to the future and can hope, but regret, which
is what Goethe did in his book The Sorrows of Young
Werther, closes the door of hope and love becomes un-
happy. Kierkegaard points to "faith as the highest" ex-
pectancy because faith is something that everyone has, or
can have. He says: "The person who wishes it for an-
other person wishes it for himself; the person who wishes
it for himself wishes it for every other human being, be-
cause that by which another person has faith is not that
by which he is different from him but is that by which he
is like him; that by which he possesses it is not that by
which he is different from others but that by which he is
altogether like all."

The characters in Either/Or believe everyone is alike in
that everyone has talent or everyone has the conditions
that would allow them to live an ethical life. Goethe
wanted to love and complained that he couldn't be loved,
but everyone else could be loved. But he wished, he didn't
have an expectancy to work his will to love. Kierkegaard
responds to him in this way:

You know that you must not wish-and
thereupon he went further. When his soul be-
came anxious, he called to it and said: When
you are anxious, it is because you are wishing;
anxiety is a form of wishing, and you know that
you must not wish-then he went further. When
he was close to despair, when he said: I cannot;
everyone else can-only I cannot not. Oh, that I
had never heard those words, that with my grief
I had been allowed to go my way undisturbed-
and with my wish. Then he called to his soul
and said: Now you are being crafty, for you
say that you are wishing and pretend that it is
a question of something external that one can
wish, whereas you know that it is something in-
ternal that one can only will; you are deluding
yourself, for you say: Everyone else can-only I
cannot. And yet you know that that by which
others are able is that by which they are alto-
gether like you-so if it really were true that you
cannot, then neither could the others. So you
betray not only your own cause but, insofar as

it lies with you, the cause of all people; and in
your humbly shutting yourself out from their
number, you are slyly destroying their power.
Then he went further. After he had been slowly
and for a long time brought up under the dis-
ciplinarian in this way, he perhaps would have
arrived at faith. S0ren Kierkegaard, Two Up-
building Discourses, 1843 p. 9-12

The "Ultimatium" at the end of the second volume of
Either/Or hinted at a future discussion of the religious
stage in The Two Upbuilding Discourses, "Ask yourself
and keep on asking until you find the answer, for one may
have known something many times, acknowledged it; one
may have willed something many times, attempted it-and
yet, only the deep inner motion, only the heart's inde-
scribable emotion, only that will convince you that what
you have acknowledged belongs to you, that no power can
take it from you-for only the truth that builds up is truth
for you." 141 ' This discussion is included in Stages on Life's
Way (1845). The first two sections revisit and refine the
aesthetic and ethical stages elucidated in Either/Or, while
the third section, Guilty/Not Guilty is about the religious
stage and refers specifically to Goethe's other book, The
Autobiography of Goethe: Truth and Poetry, from My
Own Life vol 1, 2 [42]

In addition to the discourses, one week after Either/Or
was published, Kierkegaard published a newspaper ar-
ticle in Faidrelandet, titled "Who Is the Author Of Ei-
ther/Or?", attempting to create authorial distance from
the work, emphasizing the content of the work and the
embodiment of a particular way of life in each of the
pseudonyms. Kierkegaard, using the pseudonym 'A.F.',
writes, "most people, including the author of this article,
think it is not worth the trouble to be concerned about
who the author is. They are happy not to know his iden-
tity, for then they have only the book to deal with, without
being bothered or distracted by his personality ." |43]

6 Themes

See also: Philosophy of S0ren Kierkegaard

The various essays in Either/Or help elucidate the various
forms of aestheticism and ethical existence. Both A and
Judge Vilhelm attempt to focus primarily upon the best
that their mode of existence has to offer.

A fundamental characteristic of the aesthete is immedi-
acy. In Either/Or, there are several levels of immedi-
acy explored, ranging from unrefined to refined. Unre-
fined immediacy is characterized by immediate cravings
for desire and satisfaction through enjoyments that do not
require effort or personal cultivation (e.g. alcohol, drugs,
casual sex, sloth, etc.) Refined immediacy is character-
ized by planning how best to enjoy life aesthetically. The

10

7 INTERPRETATION

"theory" of social prudence given in Crop Rotation is an
example of refined immediacy. Instead of mindless hedo-
nistic tendencies, enjoyments are contemplated and "cul-
tivated" for maximum pleasure. However, both the re-
fined and unrefined aesthetes still accept the fundamental
given conditions of their life, and do not accept the re-
sponsibility to change it. If things go wrong, the aesthete
simply blames existence, rather than one's self, assuming
some unavoidable tragic consequence of human existence
and thus claims life is meaningless. 1151 Kierkegaard spoke
of immediacy this way in his sequel to Either/Or, Stages
on Life's Way,

"The esthetic sphere is the sphere of im-
mediacy, the ethical the sphere of requirement
(and this requirement is so infinite that the indi-
vidual always goes bankrupt), the religious the
sphere of fulfillment, but, please note, not a ful-
fillment such as when one fills an alms box or
a sack with gold, for repentance has specifi-
cally created a boundless space, and as a con-
sequence the religious contradiction: simulta-
neously to be out on 70,000 fathoms of water
and yet be joyful. Just as the ethical sphere is
a passageway-which one nevertheless does not
pass through once and for all-just as repentance
is its expression, so repentance is the most di-
alectical. No wonder, then, that one fears it, for
if one gives it a finger it takes the whole hand.
Just as Jehovah in the Old Testament visits the
iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto
the latest generations, so repentance goes back-
ward, continually presupposing the object of
its investigation. In repentance there is the im-
pulse of the motion, and therefore everything
is reversed. This impulse signifies precisely
the difference between the esthetic and the re-
ligious as the difference between the external
and the internal." S0ren Kierkegaard, Stages on
Life's Way, Hong translation, p. 476-477

Commitment is an important characteristic of the ethi-
cist. Commitments are made by being an active partic-
ipant in society, rather than a detached observer or out-
sider. The ethicist has a strong sense of responsibility,
duty, honor and respect for his friendships, family, and
career. 1151 Judge Vilhelm uses the example of marriage as
an example of an ethical institution requiring strong com-
mitment and responsibility. Whereas the aesthete would
be bored by the repetitive nature of marriage (e.g. mar-
ried to one person only), the ethicist believes in the ne-
cessity of self-denial (e.g. self-denying unmitigated plea-
sure) in order to uphold one's obligations. 1151 Kierkegaard
had Judge William speak again in his 1 845 book Stages
on Life's Way. Here he described the enemies the sin-
gle individual faces when trying to make a commitment,
probability and the outcome.

These is a phantom that frequently prowls

around when the making of a resolution is at
stake-it is probability-a spineless fellow, as dab-
bler, a Jewish peddler, with whom no freeborn
soul becomes involved, a good-for-nothing fel-
low who ought to be jailed instead of quacks,
male and female, since he tricks people out of
what is more valuable than money. Anyone
who with regard to resolution comes no further,
never comes any further than to decide on the
basis of probability, is lost for ideality, what-
ever he may become. If a person does not en-
counter God in the resolution, if he has never
made a resolution in which he had a transac-
tion with God, he might just as well have never
lived. But God always does business wholesale,
and probability is a security that is not regis-
tered in heaven. Thus it is so very important
that there be an element in the resolution that
impresses officious probability and renders it
speechless. There is a phantasm that the person
making a resolution chases after the way a dog
chases its shadow in the water; it is the outcome,
a symbol of finiteness, a mirage of perdition-
woe to the person who looks to it, he is lost.
Just as the person who, if bitten by serpents,
looked at the cross in the desert and became
healthy, so the person who fastens his gaze on
the outcome is bitten by a serpent, wounded by
the secular mentality, lost both for time and for
eternity. S0ren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life's
Way, Hong, p. 1 10

Kierkegaard stresses the "eternal" nature of marriage and
says "something new comes into existence" through the
wedding ceremony. 1441 The aesthete doesn't see it that
way. The aesthete makes a "half hour's resolution"' 451
but the ethical person, and especially the religious per-
son, makes the "good resolution". 1461 Someone devoted
to pleasure finds it impossible to make this kind of
resolution.' 471 The ethical and "Christian religious" 1481
person make the resolution because they have the will to
have a true conception of life and of oneself '."I 491 A res-
olution involves change but for the single individual this
involves only change in oneself. It never means changing
the whole world or even changing the other person. 1501

7 Interpretation

The extremely nested pseudonymity of this work adds a
problem of interpretation. A and B are the authors of the
work, Eremita is the editor. Kierkegaard's role in all this
appears to be that he deliberately sought to disconnect
himself from the points of view expressed in his works,
although the absurdity of his pseudonyms' bizarre Latin
names proves that he did not hope to thoroughly conceal
his identity from the reader. Kierkegaard's Papers first
edition VUI(2), B 81 - 89 explain this method in writing.

7.2 Christian Interpretation

11

On interpretation there is also much to be found in The
Point of View of My Work as an Author) ■ ^

Furthermore, Kierkegaard was a close reader of the aes-
thetic works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the
ethical works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Each
presented a way of living one's life in a different man-
ner. Kierkegaard's writings in this book are close to what
Goethe wrote in his Autobiography.

All men of a good disposition feel, with
increasing cultivation, that they have a double
part to play in the world, -a real one and an ideal
one, and in this feeling is the ground of every-
thing noble to be sought. The real part which
has been assigned to us we experience but too
plainly; with respect to the second, we seldom
come to a clear understanding about it. Man
may seek his higher destination on earth or in
heaven, in the present or in the future, he yet
remains on this account exposed to an external
wavering, to an influence from without which
ever disturbs him, until he once for all makes
a resolution to declare that that is right which
is suitable to himself. Among the most venial
attempts to acquire something higher, to place
oneself on an equality with something higher,
may be classed the youthful impulse to com-
pare oneself with the characters in novels. This
is highly innocent, and whatever may be urged
against it, the very reverse of mischievous. It
amuses at times when we should necessarily die
of ennui, or grasp at the recreation of passion.
How often is repeated the litany about the mis-
chief of novels-and yet what misfortune is it
if a pretty girl or a handsome young man put
themselves in the place of a person who fares
better or worse than themselves? Is the citi-
zen life, worth so much? or do the necessities
of the day so completely absorb the man, that
he must refuse every beautiful demand which is
made upon him? The cold world, which judges
only from one side, is not to be blamed if it sets
down as ridiculous and objectionable all that
comes forward as imaginary, but the thinking
connoisseur of mankind must know how to es-
timate it according to its worth.

• The Autobiography of Johann Goethe,
published 1811-1833, p. 400-401 [52]

7.1 Existential interpretation

A common interpretation of Either/Or presents the reader
with a choice between two approaches to life. There are
no standards or guidelines which indicate how to choose.
The reasons for choosing an ethical way of life over the
aesthetic only make sense if one is already committed to
an ethical way of life. Suggesting the aesthetic approach

as evil implies one has already accepted the idea that there
is a good/evil distinction to be made. Likewise, choosing
an aesthetic way of life only appeals to the aesthete, ruling
Judge Vilhelm's ethics as inconsequential and preferring
the pleasures of seduction. Thus, existentialists see Victor
Eremita as presenting a radical choice in which no pre-
ordained value can be discerned. One must choose, and
through one's choices, one creates what one is. [2]

However, the aesthetic and the ethical ways of life are not
the only ways of living. Kierkegaard continues to flesh out
other stages in further works, and the Stages on Life 's Way
is considered a direct sequel to Either/Or. However, it is
not the same as Either/Or as he points out in Concluding
Postscript in 1846.

In connection with Tivoli entertainments
and literary New Year's presents it hold trues
for the catch-penny artists and those who are
caught by them, that variety is the highest law
of life. But in connection with the truth as
inwardness in existence, in connection with a
more incorruptible joy of life, which has noth-
ing in common with the craving of the life-
weary for diversion, the opposite holds true;
the law is: , the same and yet changed, and still
the same. That is why lovers of Tivoli are so lit-
tle interested in eternity, for it is the nature of
eternity always to be the same, and the sobriety
of the spirit is recognizable in the knowledge
that a change in externalities is mere diversion,
while change in the same is inwardness. But
so curious, by and large, is the reading public,
that an author who desires to get rid of it has
merely to give a little hint, just a name, and
it will say: it is the same. For otherwise the
differences between the Stages and Either/Or
are obvious enough. Not to speak of the fact
that two-thirds of it is about as different as is
categorically possible. The first two-thirds of
the book, Victor Eremita, who was before sim-
ply an editor, is now transformed into an exist-
ing individual; Constantine and Johannes the
Seducer have received a more profound char-
acterization; the Judge is occupied with mar-
riage from quite a different point of view than
in Either/Or, while scarcely the most attentive
reader will find a single expression, a single turn
of thought or phrase, precisely as it was in Ei-
ther/Or. Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Un-
scientific Postscript, p. 254-255 translation by
David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie 1941,
Princeton University Press

7.2 Christian Interpretation

The whole book can be viewed as the struggle individ-
uals go through as they attempt to find meaning in their

12

7 INTERPRETATION

lives. Victor Eremita bought a secretary (desk), which
was something external, and said, "a new period of your
life must begin with the acquisition of the secretary".' 531
"A" desires the absolute highest. He can find no mean-
ing in his life until he begins to study. He writes letters
for the dead like the historians do. He's trying to find
God by studying the past as Hegel did. Don Juan seduces
him away from God and Faust robs him of his innocent
faith through the power of language. For him, tautology
is the highest realm of thought. [54] He's someone who is
in complete "conflict with his environment" because he is
relating himself to externals. [55]

"B" argues with "A". He says ethics are the highest. "A"
wants to remain a mystery to himself but "B" says it's the
meaning of life to become open to yourself. It's more
important to know yourself than historical persons. The
more you know about yourself the more you can find
your eternal validity. God will bless the most ethical per-
son. Each one knows what's best for the other but neither
knows what's best for himself.

Kierkegaard, speaking in the voice of the upbuilding dis-
course at the end, says they are both wrong. They're both
trying to find God in a childish way. Whatever they re-
late to in an external way will never make them happy or
give them meaning. Art, science, dogma and ethics con-
stantly change. We all want to be in the right and never
in the wrong. Once we find what we desire we find that it
wasn't what we imagined it to be. So Kierkegaard says to
leave it all to God.

How true human nature is to itself. With
what native genius does not a little child often
show us a living image of the greater relation.
Today I really enjoyed watching little Louis.
He sat in his little chair; he looked about him
with apparent pleasure. The nurse Mary went
through the room. "Mary," he cried. "Yes, lit-
tle Louis," she answered with her usual friend-
liness, and came to him. He tipped his head
a little to one side, fastened his immense eyes
upon her with a certain gleam of mischief in
them, and thereupon said quite phlegmatically,
"Not this Mary, another Mary." What about us
older folk? We cry out to the whole world, and
when it comes smiling to meet us, then we say:
"This is not the Mary." Either/Or I, Swenson,
p. 34-35

Father in heaven! Teach us to pray rightly
so that our hearts may open up to you in prayer
and supplication and hide no furtive desire that
we know is not acceptable to you, nor any se-
cret fear that you will deny us anything that
will truly be for our good, so that the labour-
ing thoughts, the restless mind, the fearful heart
may find rest in and through that alone in which
and through which it can be found-by always

joyfully thanking you as we gladly confess that
in relation to you we are always in the wrong.
Amen. Either /Or Part II, p. 341 [56]

The three spheres of existence were neatly summed up
in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical
Fragments.

There are three existence spheres: the es-
thetic, the ethical, the religious. To these there
is receptively corresponding border territory:
irony is the border territory between the es-
thetic and the ethical; humor is the confinium
(border territory) between the ethical and the
religious. Irony emerges by continually join-
ing the particulars of the finite with the ethi-
cal infinite requirement and allowing the con-
tradiction to come into existence. . . . Irony is
the unity of ethical passion, which in inward-
ness infinitely accentuates one's own I in re-
lation to the ethical requirement-and culture,
which in externality infinitely abstracts from
the personal I as a finitude included among all
other finitudes and particulars. An effect of
this abstraction is that no one notices the first,
and this is precisely the art, and through it the
true infinitizing of the first is conditioned. (The
desperate attempt of the miscarried Hegelian
ethics to make the state into the court of last
resort of ethics is a highly unethical attempt
to finitize individuals, an unethical flight from
the category of individuality to the category
of the race. The ethicist in Either/Or has al-
ready protested against this directly and indi-
rectly, indirectly at the end of the essay on the
balance between the esthetic and the ethical in
the personality where he himself must make
a concession with regard to the religious, and
again at the end of the article on Marriage (in
Stages), where, even on the basis of the ethics
he champions, which is diametrically opposite
to Hegelian ethics, [57] he certainly jacks up the
price of the religious as high as possible but
still makes room for it. Note p. 503) Most
people live in the opposite way. They are busy
with being something when someone is watch-
ing them. If possible, they are something in
their own eyes as soon as others are watching
them, but inwardly, where the absolute require-
ment is watching them, they have no taste for
accentuating the personal I. Irony is the culti-
vation of the spirit and therefore follows next
after immediacy; then comes the ethicist, then
the humorist, then the religious person, p.501-
504

13

7.3 Kantian interpretation

A recent way to interpret Either/Or is to read it as an ap-
plied Kantian text. Scholars for this interpretation include
Alasdair Maclntyre' 58 ' and Ronald M. Green. [59] In After
Virtue, Maclntyre claims Kierkegaard is continuing the
Enlightenment project set forward by Hume and Kant.' 601
Green notes several points of contact with Kant in Ei-
ther/Or^

However, other scholars think Kierkegaard adopts Kan-
tian themes in order to criticize them,' 581 while yet oth-
ers think that although Kierkegaard adopts some Kantian
themes, their final ethical positions are substantially dif-
ferent. George Stack argues for this latter interpretation,
writing, "Despite the occasional echoes of Kantian senti-
ments in Kierkegaard's writings (especially in Either/Or),
the bifurcation between his ethics of self -becoming and
Kant's formalistic, meta-empirical ethics is, mutatis mu-
tandis, complete ... Since radical individuation, speci-
ficity, inwardness, and the development of subjectivity
are central to Kierkegaard's existential ethics, it is clear,
essentially, that the spirit and intention of his practical
ethics is divorced from the formalism of Kant."' 621

7.4 Biographical interpretation

Regine Olsen, a muse for Kierkegaard's writings.

From a purely literary and historical point of view, Ei-
ther/Or can be seen as a thinly veiled autobiography of the
events between Kierkegaard and his ex-fiancee Regine
Olsen. Johannes the Seducer in The Diary of a Se-
ducer treats the object of his affection, Cordelia, much as

Kierkegaard treats Regine: befriending her family, asking
her to marry him, and breaking off the engagement.' 631
Either/Or, then, could be the poetic and literary expres-
sion of Kierkegaard's decision between a life of sensual
pleasure, as he had experienced in his youth, or a pos-
sibility of marriage and what social responsibilities mar-
riage might or ought to entail.' 21 Ultimately however, Ei-
ther/Or stands philosophically independent of its relation
to Kierkegaard's life.' 641

Yet, Kierkegaard was concerned about Regine because
she tended to assume the life -view of characters she saw
in the plays of Shakespeare at the theater. One day she
would be "Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing"^ and
another Juliet.' 66 ' He thought this to be a difficulty she
needed to surpass and diagnosed' 67 ' both her and himself
like this in Stages on Life's Way (1845).

No, what she will be healed by is a life-
wisdom permeated with a certain religious-
ness, a not exactly unbeautiful compound of
something of the esthetic, of the religious, and
of a life-philosophy. My view of life is a dif-
ferent one, and I force myself to the best of my
ability to hold my life to the category and hold
it firmly. This is what I will; this is what I ask of
anyone I am to admire, of anyone I am really to
approve-that during the day he think only of the
category of his life and dream about it at night.
I judge no one; anyone busily engaged in judg-
ing others in concreto rarely remains true to the
category. It is the same as with the person who
seeks in someone else's testimony a proof that
he is earnest; he is eo ipso not in earnest, for
earnestness is first and foremost positive confi-
dence, in oneself. But every existence that wills
something thereby indirectly judges, and the
person who wills the category indirectly judges
him who does not will. I also know that even if
a person has only one step left to take he may
stumble and relinquish his category; but I do
not believe that I would therefore escape from
it and be rescued by nonsense; I believe that
it would hold on to me and judge me, and in
this judgment there would in turn be the cate-
gory. S0ren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life's Way,
Hong, p. 304-305

8 Reception

8.1 Early reception

Either/Or established Kierkegaard's reputation as a re-
spected author.' 681 Henriette Wulff, in a letter to Hans
Christian Andersen, wrote, "Recently a book was pub-
lished here with the title Either /Or\ It is supposed to be
quite strange, the first part full of Don Juanism, skepti-

14

8 RECEPTION

cism, et cetera, and the second part toned down and con-
ciliating, ending with a sermon that is said to be quite ex-
cellent. The whole book attracted much attention. It has
not yet been discussed publicly by anyone, but it surely
will be. It is actually supposed to be by a Kierkegaard
who has adopted a pseudonym...."' 681

Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791-1860)

Johan Ludvig Heiberg, a prominent Hegelian, at first
criticized the aesthetic section, Either (Part I), then he
had much better things to say about Or, Part II. [69] Julie
Watkin said "Kierkegaard replied to Heiberg in The Fa-
therland as Victor Eremita, blaming Heiberg for not read-
ing the preface to Either/Or which would have given
him the key to the work." 170 ' Kierkegaard later used
his book Prefaces to publicly respond to Heiberg and
Hegelianism. [71] He also published a short article, Who
is the Author of Either/Or?, a week after the publication
of Either/Or itself. [72]

In 1886 Georg Brandes compared Either/Or with
Frederik Paludan-Miiller's Kalanus in Eminent Authors of
the Nineteenth Century, which was translated into English
at that time. Later, in 1906, he compared Kierkegaard's
Diary of the Seducer with Rousseau's Julie, or the New
Heloise and with Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther.
He also compared Either/Or to Henrik Ibsen's Brand but
Edmund Gosse disagreed with him.' 731

Next to Adam Homo,the
most interesting work of Paludan-
Muller is Kalanus. It is the positive
expression of his ideal, as Adam
Homo is the negative. Nowhere is
his intellectual tendency more akin

to the negative bent of his great
contemporary Kierkegaard than in
this work. The problem which
Kalanus endeavors to solve is pre-
cisely the same as the one whose so-
lution Kierkegaard attacked in his
Either-Or (Enten-Eller), namely,
that of contrasting two personal-
ities, one of whom is the direct
representative of innate genius, of
the pleasure -loving, extremely en-
ergetic view of life; and the other
the incarnation of ethical profun-
dity and moral grandeur, allowing
them to struggle and contend, and
convincing the reader of the de-
cisive defeat of the purely natural
views of life. With Kierkegaard the
two opposing modes of contempla-
tion of life are represented by a fol-
lower of aesthetics, and a judge of
the supreme court, with Paludan-
Muller by celebrated names in his-
tory; no less a man than the con-
queror of the world, Alexander the
Great, represents in Kalanus the
aesthetic view of life, and the oppo-
nent allotted to him is the philoso-
pher Kalanus. The ideal situation in
the presentation of the intellectual
wrestling-match of this sort would
be that the author should succeed
in equipping the contending parties
with an equal degree of excellency.
The actual situation, in this case, is
that with Kierkegaard the represen-
tative of aesthetics is lavishly en-
dowed with intellectual gifts, while
the endowments of the representa-
tive of ethics, on the other hand, ap-
pear somewhat wooden and weak;
and that with Paluden-Muller, on
the contrary, the representative of
ethics is no less intellectual than in-
spired, a man of the purest spiritual
beauty, while the great Alexander is
not placed upon the pinnacle of his
historic fame.' 741

A third significant feature in
[Rousseau's] La Nouvelle Heloise
is that, just as we have passion
in place of gallantry and inequal-
ity of station in place of simi-
larity of rank, we have also the
moral conviction of the sanctity of
marriage in place of that honour
grounded on aristocratic pride and
self-respect, which stood for virtue

8. 1 Early reception

in fashionable literature. This
word, Virtue, little in vogue un-
til now, became with Rousseau
and his school a watchword which
was in perfect harmony with their
other watchword, Nature; for to
Rousseau virtue was a natural con-
dition. Following the example of
society, French literature had been
making merry at the expense of
marriage; Rousseau, therefore, de-
fied the spirit of the times by writing
a book in its honour. His heroine
returns the passion of her lover, but
marries another, to whom she re-
mains faithful. Here, as in Werther
the lover proper loses the maiden,
who is wedded to a Monsieur Wol-
mar (the Albert of Werther and the
Edward of Kierkegaard's Diary of
a Seducer), a man as irreproach-
able as he is uninteresting. The
moral conviction which is vindi-
cated and glorified in Rousseau as
Virtue, is the same as that which
in Chateaubriand, under the influ-
ence of the religious reaction, takes
the form of a binding religious
vow. Georg Morris Cohen Bran-
des, Main Currents in Nineteenth
Century Literature Vol. 1 (1906), p.
16-17

Kierkegaard later referred to his concept of choosing
yourself as the single individual in The Concept of Anxi-
ety, June 17, 1844, and then in his Four Upbuilding Dis-
courses, August 31, 1844, and once again in Upbuilding
Discourses in Various Spirits, 1847. William James
echoed Kierkegaard in his lecture on The Sick Soul where
he wrote, "the man must die to an unreal life before he
can be born into the real life." 1751

You are outside yourself and therefore can-
not do without the other as opposition; you be-
lieve that only a restless spirit is alive, and all
who are experienced believe that only a quiet
spirit is truly alive. For you a turbulent sea is
a symbol of life; for me it is the quiet, deep
water. Either/Or Part II p. 144, Hong

Anxiety is a qualification of
dreaming spirit, and as such it has
its place in psychology. Awake,
the difference between myself and
my other is posited; sleeping, it is
suspended; dreaming, it is an in-
timated nothing. The actuality of
the spirit constantly shows itself as

a form that tempts its possibility but
disappears as soon as it seeks to
grasp for it, and it is a nothing that
can only bring anxiety. More it can-
not do as long as it merely shows it-
self. The concept of anxiety is al-
most never treated in psychology.
Therefore, I must point out that it
is altogether different from fear and
similar concepts that refer to some-
thing definite, whereas anxiety is
freedom's actuality as the possibil-
ity of possibility. For this rea-
son, anxiety is not found in the
beast, precisely because by nature
the beast is not qualified as spirit.
The Concept of Anxiety, Nichol p.
42

Now he discovers that the self
he chooses has a boundless multi-
plicity within itself inasmuch as it
has a history, a history in which
he acknowledges identity with him-
self. This history is of a different
kind, for in this history he stands
in relation to other individuals in
the race, and to the whole race, and
this history contains painful things,
and yet he is the person he is only
through this history. That is why
it takes courage to choose oneself,
for at the same time as he seems to
be isolating himself most radically
he is most radically sinking himself
into the root by which he is bound
up with the whole. This makes
him uneasy, and yet it must be so,
for when the passion of freedom is
aroused in him-and it is aroused in
the choice just as it presupposes it-
self in the choice-he chooses him-
self and struggles for this posses-
sion as for his salvation, and it is his
salvation. Either/Or Part II, Hong,
p. 216

When a person turns and faces
himself in order to understand him-
self, he steps, as it were, in the way
of that first self, halts that which
was turned outward in hankering
for and seeking after the surround-
ing world that is its object, and
summons it back from the exter-
nal. In order to prompt the first self
to this withdrawal, the deeper self
lets the surrounding world remain
what it is-remain dubious. This

8 RECEPTION

is indeed the way it is; the world
around us is inconstant and can be
changed into the opposite at any
moment, and there is not one per-
son who can force this change by
his own might or by the conjura-
tion of his wish. The deeper self
now shapes the deceitful flexibility
of the surrounding world in such
a way that it is no longer attrac-
tive to the first self. Then the first
self either must proceed to kill the
deeper self, to render it forgotten,
whereby the whole matter is given
up; or it must admit that the deeper
self is right, because to want to
predicate constancy of something
that continually changes is indeed
a contradiction, and as soon as one
confesses that it changes, it can of
course, change in that same mo-
ment. However much that first self
shrinks from this, there is no word-
smith so ingenious or no thought-
twister so wily that he can invali-
date the deeper self's eternal claim.
There is only one way out, and that
is to silence the deeper self by let-
ting the roar of inconstancy drown
it out. Eighteen Upbuilding Dis-
courses, 1845, Hong translation, p.
314

Just as a man changes his clothes for celebra-
tion, so a person preparing for the holy act of
confession is inwardly changed. It is indeed
like changing one's clothes to divest oneself of
multiplicity in order to make up one's mind
about one thing, to interrupt the pace of busy
activity in order to put on the repose of con-
templation in unity with oneself. And this unity
with oneself is the celebration's simple festive
dress that is the condition of admittance. Up-
building Discourses in Various Spirits, S0ren
Kierkegaard, 1847, Hong, p. 19

If a person whose life has been tried in
some crucial difficulty has a friend and some-
time later he is unable to retain the past clearly,
if anxiety creates confusion, and if accusing
thoughts assail him with all their might as he
works his way back, then he may go to his
friend and say, "My soul is sick so that noth-
ing will become clear to me, but I confided ev-
erything to you; you remember it, so please ex-
plain the past to me again." But if a person has
no friend, he presumably goes to God if un-
der other circumstances he has confided some-
thing to him, if in the hour of decision he called

God as witness when no one understood him.
And the one who went to his friend perhaps was
not understood at times, perhaps was filled with
self-loathing, which is even more oppressive,
upon discovering that the one to whom he had
confided his troubles had not understood him at
all, even though he had listened, had not sensed
what was making him anxious, but had only
an inquisitive interest in his unusual encounter
with life. But this would never happen with
God; who would dare to venture to think this
of God, even if he is cowardly enough to pre-
fer to forget God-until he stands face-to-face
with the judge, who passes judgment on him
but not on the one who truly has God as a wit-
ness, because where God is the judge, there is
indeed no judge if God is the witness. It by no
means follows that a person's life becomes easy
because he learns to know God in this way. On
the contrary, it can become very hard; it may
become more difficult than the contemptible
easiness of sensate human life, but in this diffi-
culty life also acquires ever deeper and deeper
meaning. S0ren Kierkegaard, Four Upbuilding
Discourses August 31, 1844 (Eighteen Upbuild-
ing Discourses p. 324)

August Strindberg (1849-1910)

August Strindberg was familiar with Either/Or and this

8.2 Later reception

17

book made him "forever a champion of the ethical as jux-
taposed to the aesthetic life conception and he always re-
mained faithful to the idea that art and knowledge must
be subservient to life, and that life itself must be lived as
we know best, chiefly because we are part of it and can-
not escape from its promptings." 1761 Strindberg was ob-
viously attracted to Either/Or Part II where Kierkegaard
developed his categorical imperative. He wrote the fol-
lowing in Growth of a Soul published posthumously in
1913 about Kierkegaard's Either — Or. "it was valid only
for the priests who called themselves Christians and the
seducer and Don Juan were the author himself, who sat-
isfied his desires in imagination". Part II was his "Dis-
course on Life as a Duty, and when he reached the end
of the work he found the moral philosopher in despair,
and that all this teaching about duty had only produced a
Philistine." He then states that Kierkegaard's discourses
might have led him closer to Christianity but he didn't
know if he could come back to something "which had
been torn out, and joyfully thrown into the fire". How-
ever after reading the book he "felt sinful". Then another
writer began to influence his life. 1771

This is how he described Either/Or.

But another element now entered into his
life, and had a decided influence both on his
views of things and his work. This was his
acquaintance with two men, — an author and
a remarkable personality. Unfortunately they
were both abnormal and therefore had only a
disturbing effect upon his development. The
author was Kierkegaard, whose book, Either —
Or, John had borrowed from a member of the
Song Club, and read with fear and trembling.
His friends had also read it as a work of genius,
had admired the style, but not been specialty
influenced by it, — a proof that books have little
effect, when they do not find readers in sympa-
thy with the author. But upon John the book
made the impression intended by the author.
He read the first part containing "The Confes-
sions of an Esthete." He felt sometimes carried
away by it, but always had an uncomfortable
feeling as though present at a sick-bed. The pe-
rusal of the first part left a feeling of emptiness
and despair behind it. The book agitated him.
"The Diary of a Seducer" he regarded as the
fancies of an unclean imagination. Things were
not like that in real life. Moreover John was no
sybarite, but on the contrary inclined to asceti-
cism and self-torment. Such egotistic sensual-
ity as that of the hero of Kierkegaard's work
was absurd because the suffering he caused
by the satisfaction of his desires necessarily
involved him in suffering and, therefore, de-
feated his object.

The second part of the work containing the
philosopher's "Discourse on Life as a Duty,"

made a deeper impression on John. It showed
him that he himself was an "esthete" who had
conceived of authorship as a form of enjoy-
ment. Kierkegaard said that it should be re-
garded as a calling. Why? The proof was
wanting, and John, who did not know that
Kierkegaard was a Christian, but thought the
contrary, not having seen his Edifying Dis-
courses, imbibed unaware the Christian sys-
tem of ethics with its doctrine of self-sacrifice
and duty. Along with these the idea of sin re-
turned. Enjoyment was a sin, and one had to
do one's duty. Why? Was it for the sake of
society to which one was under obligations?
No! merely because it was duty. That was
simply Kant's categorical imperative. When he
reached the end of the work Either — Or and
found the moral philosopher also in despair,
and that all this teaching about duty had only
produced a Philistine, he felt broken in two.
"Then," he thought, "better be an esthete." But
one cannot be an esthete if one has been a
Christian for five-sixths of one's life, and one
cannot be moral without Christ. Thus he was
tossed to and fro like a ball between the two,
and ended in sheer despair. August Strindberg,
Growth of a Soul, 165-166

Kierkegaard put an end to his own double-mindedness
about devoting himself completely to aesthetics or devel-
oping a balance between the aesthetic and the ethical and
going on to an ethical/Christian religious existence 1781 in
the first part of his authorship (1843-1846) and then de-
scribed what he had learned about himself and about be-
ing a Christian beginning with Upbuilding Discourses in
Various Spirits (1847). He learned to choose' 79 ' his own
Either/Or.

each man who is mindful of himself knows
what no science knows, since he knows who he
himself is. S0ren Kierkegaard, The Concept of
Anxiety 1844, Nichol p. 78-79

even the lowliest individual has a double
existence. He, too has a history, and this is not
simply a product of his own free acts. The in-
terior deed, on the other hand, belongs to him
and will belong to him forever; history or world
history cannot take it from him; it follows him,
either to his joy or to his despair. In this world
there rules an absolute Either/Or. But philos-
ophy has nothing to do with this world. Judge
Vilhelm, Either/Or II p. 174-175 Hong 1987

8.2 Later reception

Although Either/Or was Kierkegaard's first major book,
it was one of his last books to be translated into English,

18

9 REFERENCES

as late as 1944. [801 Frederick DeW. Bolman, Jr. insisted
that reviewers consider the book in this way: "In general,
we have a right to discover, if we can, the meaning of a
work as comprehensive as Either/Or, considering it upon
its own merits and not reducing the meaning so as to fit
into the author's later perspective. It occurred to me that
this was a service to understanding Kierkegaard, whose
esthetic and ethical insights have been much slighted by
those enamored of his religion of renunciation and tran-
scendence. ... Kierkegaard's brilliance seems to me to
be showing that while goodness, truth, and beauty can
not speculatively be derived one from another, yet these
three are integrally related in the dynamics of a healthy
character structure". [81]

Thomas Henry Croxall was impressed by 'As thoughts on
music in the essay, "The Immediate Stages of the Erotic, or
Musical Erotic". Croxall argues that "the essay should be
taken seriously by a musician, because it makes one think,
and think hard enough to straighten many of one's ideas;
ideas, I mean, not only on art, but on life" and goes on to
discuss the psychological, existential, and musical value of
the work/ 821

Johannes Edouard Hohlenberg wrote a biography about
S0ren Kierkegaard in 1954 and in that book he speculated
that the Diary of the Seducer was meant to depict the life
of P.L. Moller who later (1845) wrote the articles in The
Corsair detrimental to the character of Kierkegaard.' 831
The Diary of a Seducer by itself, is a provocative novella,
and has been reproduced separately from Either/Or sev-
eral times. [84][85][86][871 John Updike said of the Diary,
"In the vast literature of love, The Seducer's Diary is an
intricate curiosity - a feverishly intellectual attempt to
reconstruct an erotic failure as a pedagogic success, a
wound masked as a boast". [8?1

Many authors were interested in separating the esthetic,
the ethical and the religious but it may have been, as far as
Kierkegaard was concerned, of more importance for the
single individual to have a way to decide when one was be-
coming dominant over the other two. Henrik Stangerup,
(1937-1998) a Danish writer, wrote three books as a way
to illustrate Kierkegaard's three stages of existence, 1981,
The Road to Lagoa Santa, which was about Kierkegaard's
brother-in-law Peter Wilhelm Lund (the ethicist), 1985
The Seducer: It Is Hard to Die in Dieppe, Peder Ludvig
Moller was the esthetic in that novel, and in 1991 Brother
Jacob which describes S0ren Kierkegaard as a Franciscan
monk. [881

In contemporary times, Either/Or received new life as a
grand philosophical work with the publication of Alasdair
Maclntyre's After Virtue (1981), where Maclntyre situ-
ates Either/Or as an attempt to capture the Enlightenment
spirit set forth by David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Af-
ter Virtue renewed Either/Or as an important ethical text
in the Kantian vein, as mentioned previously. Although
Maclntyre accuses Victor Eremita of failing to provide
a criterion for one to adopt an ethical way of life, many

scholars have since replied to Maclntyre's accusation in
Kierkegaard After Maclntyre S 5S]lS9]

9 References

9.1 Primary references

• Either/Or: A Fragment of Life. Translated by Alas-
tair Hannay, Abridged Version. Penguin, 1992,
ISBN 978-0-14-044577-0 (Hannay)

• Either/Or. Translated by David F. Swenson and Lil-
lian Marvin Swenson. Volume I. Prinecton, 1959,
ISBN 0-691-01976-2 (Swenson)

• Kierkegaard's Writings, III, Part I: Either /Or. Parti.
Translated by Howard and Edna Hong. Princeton,
1988, ISBN 978-0-691-02041-9 (Hong)

• Kierkegaard's Writings, TV, Part II: Either /Or. Part
II. Translated by Howard and Edna Hong. Prince-
ton, 1988, ISBN 978-0-691-02042-6 (Hong)

9.2 Secondary references and notes

[1] Kierkegaard, S0ren. The Essential Kierkegaard, edited by
Howard and Edna Hong. Princeton, ISBN 0-69 1 -0 1 940- 1

[2] Warburton, Nigel. Philosophy: The Classics, 2nd edition.
Routledge, ISBN 0-415-23998-2

[3] The Enchiridion by Epictetiis XXIX

[4] S0ren Kierkegaard, Judge William, Stages on Life's Way
p. 88, 119-120 Hong

[5] Either/Or Part I, Swenson, p. 172-173

[6] Chamberlin, Jane and Jonathan Ree. The Kierkegaard
Reader. Blackwell, Oxford, 0-631-20467-9

[7] S0ren Kierkegaard, Hong and Hong (ed.) S0ren
Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, Volume 5: Autobio-
graphical, §5931 (p. 340)

[8] S0ren Kierkegaard, Hong and Hong (ed.) Either/Or Vol-
ume 1, Historical Introduction, p. vii

[9] Fichte (1762-1814) wrote against philosophy as a science
in his books The Science of Rights and The Science of
Knowledge

[ 1 0] The Science of Knowledge p. 70-75

[11] "Hegel's Science of Logic". Marxists.org. Retrieved
2011-12-27.

[12] "From this it is evident that the law of

identity itself, and still more the law of con-
tradiction, is not merely of analytic but of
synthetic nature. For the latter contains
in its expression not merely empty, simple
equality-with-self, and not merely the other

9.2 Secondary references and notes

19

of this in general, but, what is more, abso-
lute inequality, contradiction per se. But as
has been shown, the law of identity itself con-
tains the movement of reflection, identity as a
vanishing of otherness. What emerges from
this consideration is, therefore, first, that the
law of identity or of contradiction which pur-
ports to express merely abstract identity in
contrast to difference as a truth, is not a law
of thought, but rather the opposite of it; sec-
ondly, that these laws contain more than is
meant by them, to wit, this opposite, absolute
difference itself."

Hegel's Remarks § 883 & 884

[13] "The law of the excluded middle is also

distinguished from the laws of identity and
contradiction ... the latter of these asserted
that there is nothing that is at once A and not-
A. It implies that there is nothing that is nei-
ther A nor not-A, that there is not a third that
is indifferent to the opposition. But in fact
the third that is indifferent to the opposition
is given in the law itself, namely, A itself is
present in it. This A is neither +A nor -A,
and is equally well +A as -A. The something
that was supposed to be either -A or not A is
therefore related to both +A and not-A; and
again, in being related to A, it is supposed
not to be related to not-A, nor to A, if it is
related to not-A. The something itself, there-
fore, is the third which was supposed to be
excluded. Since the opposite determinations
in the something are just as much posited
as sublated in this positing, the third which
has here the form of a dead something, when
taken more profoundly, is the unity of reflec-
tion into which the opposition withdraws as
into ground."

Hegel's Remarks § 952-954

[14] Beiser, Frederick C. The Cambridge Companion to Hegel.
Cambridge, ISBN 0-521-3871 1-6

[15] Watts, Michael. Kierkegaard. Oneworld, ISBN 1-85168-
317-8

[16] Either/Or Part II, Hong, p. 214ff

[17] Magill, Frank N. Masterpieces of World Philosophy.
HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-270051-0

[18] Gardiner, Patrick. Kierkegaard: Past Masters. Oxford,
ISBN 978-0-19-287642-3

[19] Oden, Thomas C. Parables of Kierkegaard. Princeton
University Press, ISBN 978-0-691-02053-2.

[20] See Stages on Life's Way, Hong, p. 143-144

[21] Either/Or Part I, Swenson, p. 66ff

[22] Either/Or Part I, Swenson, p. 107,190-191

[23] Either/Or Part I, Swenson, p. 145-147

[24] Either/Or Part I, Swenson, p. 139-145

[25] Either/Or Part I, Swenson, p. 27 "sleeping is the highest",
32 "A good cut" of meat is the highest, 37-39 "Tautology
is the highest law of thought", 46-47 "I will form a sect
which not only gives Mozart first place", 59 "sensuousness
is first posited in Christianity", 63 "Don Juan deserves the
highest place', 68 music is higher than language, 101 "Don
Juan is absolutely musical"

[26] 154-156 "Antigone's" "sorrow", 167-168 "grief", 177-
178 "deception" which is for love an absolute paradox",
1 82ff the inability to decide if you've been deceived, 220-
22 1 "unhappy consciousness"

[27] See S0ren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life's Way, Hong, p.
323-328

[28] Eugene Scribe e-Notes

[29] Eugene Scribe The First Love, Hathi Trust

[30] Either/Or Part I, Swenson, p. 253

[31] Stages on Life's Way, Hong, p. 7 Iff

[32] Victor Eremita's speech begins on p. 56 (Stages on Life's
Way) The Young Man speaks as well as the Fashion De-
signer

[33] Stages on Life's Way, Hong, p. 73

[34] Kierkegaard repeats this theme often in his writings. The
third section of Stages on Life's Way (1845) Hong p.
185ff, Guilty? Not Guilty?, is about a person who can
never discover or accept his or her own guilt and the fourth
section of Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits ( 1 847),
The Joy of It That in Relation to God a Person Always
Suffers as Guilty Hong p. 265-288, is about the person
who "with joy" discovers his or her own guilt and that God
still loves him or her.

[35] Either/Or II p. 188 Hong

[36] S0ren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript
1846, p. 509

[37] Kierkegaard, S0ren. Samlede Vaerker. (2), II, p. 190.
1962-1964. Either/Or part II, Hong, p. 224-225

[38] Religious works penned under his own name. Commen-
tary on Kierkegaard, D. Anthony Storm,

[39] Kierkegaard, S0ren. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses.
Princeton, ISBN 0-691-02087-6.

[40] Collected by Princeton University Press in Eighteen Up-
building Discourses

[41] Either/Or Part II, Hong, p. 354

[42] Kierkegaard, S0ren. Stages on Life's Way, p. 148ff trans.
Howard and Edna Hong. Princeton University Press,
ISBN 978-0-691-02049-5

[43] D. Anthony on Who is the Author?

[44] Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, Hong, p. 44-47

[45] Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Hong, p. 380-381

20

[46] Either/Or Part II, Hong, p. 102-105, 111-112 and Three
Discourses on Imagined Occasions, Hong, p. 48

[47] Concluding Upbuilding Discourse, Hong, p. 294

[48] Either/Or Part II, Hong, p. 298-299

[49] Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, Hong, p. 52, 58,
63

[50] Either/Or Part II, Hong, p. 19-23, Three Discourses on
Imagined Occasions, Hong, p. 50, Works of Love, Hong
1995 Princeton University Press, p. 7-10, 13-15, 34, 213-
218

[51] Kierkegaard, S0ren. The Point of View, translated by
Howard and Edna Hong, Princeton University Press,
ISBN 978-0-691-05855-9

[52] The Autobiography of Johann Goethe

[53] Either/Or Part I, Swenson, Preface, p. 4-5

[54] Either/Or Part I, Swenson, Preface p. 63, 70-71, 1 15-1 16,
37

[55] Either/Or Part I, Swenson, p. 1 05- 1 1 0, 1 1 8- 1 1 9

[56] See Kierkegaard's Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spir-
its, Hong p. 280ff for what he was talking about as the
first, second and third stage.

[57] The Ethics of Hegel: Translated Selections from His
"Rechtsphilosophie," (1893) Archive.or

[58] Davenport, John and Anthony Rudd. Kierkegaard Af-
ter Maclntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue.
Open Court Publishing, 2001, ISBN 978-0-8126-9439-0

[59] Green, Ronald M. Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden
Debt. SUNY Press, Albany, 1992. ISBN 0-7914-1108-7

[60] Kierkegaard is familiar with Hume through the works of
Johann Georg Hamann. See "Hume and Kierkegaard" by
Richard Popkin.

[61] Green, p. 95-98

[62] Green, p. 87

[63] "Dr. Scott Moore's Summary of the Diary".
Bearspace.baylor.edu. Retrieved 201 1-12-27.

[64] Warburton, p. 181.

[65] Stages on Life 's Way p. 267

[66] Concluding Postscript p. 165-166, Note p. 447

[67] Stages on Life 's Way p. 272

[68] Garff, Joakim. S0ren Kierkegaard: A Biography. Trans.
Bruce H. Kirmmse. Princeton, 2005, 0-691-09165-X

[69] S0ren Kierkegaard, Johannes Hohlenberg, translated by
T.H. Croxall, Pantheon Books, Inc. 1954 p. 18-19

[70] Historical Dictionary of Kierkegaard's Philosophy, By
Julie Watkin, Scarecrow Press, 2001 p. 112

[71] Prefaces 47-49, 57-60

10 EXTERNAL LINKS

[72] http://sorenkierkegaard.org/who-is-author-either-or.
html

[73] Henrik feen/Gosse, Edmund, 1849-1928

[74] Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century, Georg Bran-
des Translated from the original [Danish] by Rasmus B.
Anderson 1886 p. 344-345

[75] The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James Lec-
ture 6-7 The Sick Soul

[76] Voices of To-morrow: Critical Studies of the New Spirit in
Literature, Published 1913 by Greenwood Press, p. 21-22
Archive.org

[77] Growth of a Soul, by August Strindberg; translated by
Claud Field in 1914, Chapter X, Torn to Pieces, p. 161ff

[78] Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 298-299

[79] Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, S0ren
Kierkegaard (1847) What Blessed Happiness is
Promised in Being a Human Being p. 20 Iff Hong

[80] Ree, Jonathan and Jane Chamberlain (eds). The
Kierkegaard Reader, Wiley-Blackwell, 2001, p.9.

[81] Reply to Mrs. Hess, Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 42, No. 8,
p. 219

[82] A Strange but Stimulating Essay on Music, The Musical
Times Vol. 90, No. 1272, p.46, February 1949

[83] S0ren Kierkegaard, Johannes Hohlenberg, 1954 p. 159ff

[84] Published in 2006, with Gerd Aage Gillhoff as translator,
ISBN 978-0-8264-1847-0

[85] Published in June 1966 by Ungar Pub Co., ISBN 978-0-
8044-6357-7

[86] Published in March 1999, by Pushpin Press, translated by
Alastair Hannay, ISBN 978-1-901285-23-9

[87] Published in August 1997 by Princeton, with an introduc-
tion by John Updike, ISBN 978-0-691-01737-2

[88] Historical Dictionary of Scandanvian Literature and The-
ater

[89] "After Anti-Irrationalism". Web.archive.org. 2007-11-
07. Retrieved 2011-12-27.

10 External links

• Quotations related to Either/Or at Wikiquote

• Either/Or Spark notes

• D. Anthony Storm's commentary on Either /Or

21

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